Data-Story to the Olympic Medal-History
Dashboard for the DVIZ course
Abstract
This Documents shows the history of the medals in the olympics and shows if hosting the olympics helps to get more medals.
Reading the Data
The Source of the Data can be found on Kaggle. There are two Datasets I used, one for the historic values and one for the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo
To get the Data into the correct Format, i had to rename the Countries so the are consistent across the two data-sources.
And I had to rename the Host-Column, because normally, the city was the host, but i was just interested in the host-nation.
The source of the paralympics data is Wikipedia, because there was no good dataset available online, see: China at the Paralympics.
Visuals
Paralympic-Medals by China
After hosting the Winter-Olympics in 2022, China also held the winter-paralympics for the first time. At the end, they topped the medals-table with astonishing 61 Medals. But this number alone does not mean anything. To see the true value fo it, we have to go a few Years into the past. In 2002 China participated for the first time in the Winter-Paralympics. But it wasn’t meant for them that year. They had to travel back home without a single Medal. This was going on like this until 2018, when they won their first medal and to that date only Medal. So the 61 Medals in 2022 seem to be even more impressing, given their historic form in the Paralympics.
Now, if this is cause by the additional motivation from the homesupport or any other, maybe political reason can’t be denied nor confirmed.
But it got me wondering, is it that big of an advantage to have the games at home? Or was it just an uniqueness in the world of sport.
2021 Olympics in Tokyo, Japan
For that reason, i looked at the last Summer-Olympics, which were held in Japan. Japan got the third most Gold Medals and they were fifth, when considering all Medals equally, where they got 58 of them.
But this does not really show us if they were in that position because of the home-advantage or if they are normally that good.
Comparison to non-hosting-Years
To see how well each country performed over the Years, it is the best to show the Top 15 Countries of all Time. You will see a lot of little grey dots. Every Dot represents one Olympic of the Country. The Average of all these is marked as a bigger blue Dot.
The Years in which they were hosting the Olympics, the Dot is shown in Bronze and a bit bigger as well.
While it is not that clealy visible for Japan, overall you can see a clear trend, that Years, when a country was hosting the Olympics, were much more successfull than on average, with just 2 exceptions.
The one in Sweden can be ignored, because the Olympics 1956 were held in Melbourne and just the Competitions with horses were held in Stockholm, so only these Medals do count here as “Host-Medals”.
Percentage of Gold Medals in comparison to total Medals
For the last Graphic, I want to quote Ayrton Senna, one of the best Formula 1 Racer in History. He once said:
Being second is to be the first of the ones who lose.Which really means, that being second is maybe a good result in the Olympics, but you still lost, and only the first really wins. So the only thing which really counts as an athletes is the Gold Medal. I wanted to see, if the percentage of Gold Medals in comparison to the Total Medals changes when the Olympics are at Home to see if it helps to get the last bit of energy and motivation out of your body to get to the top-step of the Podium.
And as you can see here, especially the USA have a very high Gold-Percentage, which they can’t really keep when hosting the olympics. France as well can’t keep it up.
But for Japan it can be seen really clear, they more than double their gold-percentage, going from 24% to 52% when Hosting the Olympics. For the other two countries it is also visible that it seems to help, but not that much like for Japan, they stay at around 1/3 of all Medals, so evenly spread between the three Medals.